You could be forgiven for thinking you have walked into a music store. Or is it a funky bar with its eclectic furniture? Or a Peranakan-themed French restaurant? Whatever it is, it’s hard to put Loh Lik Peng’s newest hotel in Singapore, Wanderlust, into any box.
Which is how the hotelier (left), now with five hotels to his name, wants it. “I thought design hotels were taking themselves too seriously, so I wanted to make this one fun and whimsical,” said Loh, who started his foray into hotels with Hotel 1929 in Chinatown, followed by New Majestic. Wanderlust is his third in the city.
Facing the reception desk is a giant sign that reads, “Giant surface music falling to earth like jewels from the sky”. That’s the title of the debut album from the Portland-based space-drone quartet Yume Bitsu.
Like all his other hotels – this year, he also opened Waterhouse on South Bund in Shanghai and Town Hall Hotel & Apartments in London – Wanderlust is a conversion. The shophouse sits on Dickson Road, at the edge of Little India, which has seen a boom in budget hotels lately.
When the taxi driver dropped me off, she asked me if I was going to a Peranakan restaurant. The exterior of the building is decorated with Straits Chinese motifs. I said, “French.” 
She laughed, “French in Little India? Crazy.”
The lobby is a little crazy. There’s a wall that’s covered with colourful pop art. There’s a pool table in the middle of the lounge area. Two dentist chairs take centrestage – these are Loh’s signature, he collects them as he does other things which are all displayed in the hotel. It’s a great lobby to spend time in because there are plenty of things to catch the eye.
He gave each floor of the hotel to different local designers to do their thing. His only brief was, make it fun and whimsical.
The lobby level, themed Industrial Glam, is by Asylum. Level 2, called Eccentricity, is by :phunk Studio. Lots of neon lights and colour here, it has the smallest rooms. I was shown the Purple Haze room in honour of Jimi Hendrix. I can imagine singing, “'Scuse me while I kiss the sky”, in my sleep.
Level 3 by DP Architects, themed “is it Black and White”, features Pop-Art works and Origami. The origami rooms, which play on folds, are the most feminine of the lot.
Level 4 is all about “Creature Comforts” by fFurious and the loft rooms are designed to fulfill fantasies. I like the “Tree Monster” room because the ceiling is covered with brown and green leaves and made me feel like I was Little Red Riding Hood without the big bad wolf in tow. There’s also one called “Rusty Typewriter” – there’s a themed sofa that made me feel like I could dance on the keys.
Loh’s favourite is the “Space Room” – it’s got red space ships in it, and the ceiling ha twinkling lights to help you dream of space as you sleep. “It’s for the inner child in me,” the former lawyer-turned-hotelier said.
Its French restaura
nt, Cocotte, is already getting rave reviews in local blogs. The food is rustic and unpretentious, the setting communal and friendly. The homemade Croque Monsieur was sinfully good, by the way.
At 29 rooms, Wanderlust brings Loh’s total room count in Singapore to a grand 91. “I’d rather do lots of small hotels than a few big ones. I love converting old buildings and creating hotels with character.”
The economics of this third one however is very different from when he first developed Hotel 1929. He got that building for a song. That will never happen again, he said. “The largest limiting factor is cost of land. If you’re rational about it, you wouldn’t do it.”
The higher cost of land, coupled with high construction costs which kept creeping up because it was being built at the same time as the two Integrated Resorts, meant Wanderlust cost “way, way more” than either New Majestic or Hotel 1929. “We cannot afford to make mistakes on this project; that’s why you need to make mistakes on smaller projects,” he said.
More hotels also give him some economies of scale. In his hotels, food & beverage play a large part in positioning them with the local community. Each of his hotels are known for their signature restaurants – Hotel 1929 wit
h Ember, New Majestic with its Chinese restaurant and Wanderlust with Cocotte.
In his hotels, f&b revenues are usually higher than room revenues but GOP, of course, is lower for f&B (about 25-30%) than for rooms (60%). “Food is a critical element if you want to be in the lifestyle space,” said Loh.
And while each of his hotels are different from the other, Loh said what’s interesting is they all appeal to a similar customer segment, “people who want hotels that are different, have a sense of context and story”. (His hotels, with the exception of Hotel 1929, are all part of Design Hotels.)
“No one has really done a design hotel in Little India. There are lots of backpacker places. The Western tourists love it – the streets here are more colourful than in Chinatown. It’s real here, the spices, the smells, the sounds.”
His hotels in Shanghai and London, again different in their own right, also appear to appeal to a similar type of customer. Waterhouse, located on the Bund, is a small hotel (19 rooms) with a huge events space (10,000sqft) and has been doing pretty well given the Shanghai World Expo and Town Hall with 98 rooms, located in London’s East End, attracts mainly corporate clients.
Opening a hotel in Shanghai has been tough. “Finding a good general manager there is like pulling teeth,” he said. “The operating environmen
t is tough especially when you come from a place Singapore. But it’s unavoidable – you have to do the China thing. Just like India in a few years, you have to do it.”
Having now built a collection of eclectic hotels appealing to a similar customer type, Loh now wonders if the time is right for him to create and nurture a community using social media or to create an umbrella brand.
“We’ve always operated the hotels independently, there’s no association between one or the other but maybe at some point, we may think about an umbrella brand – but we are in no hurry.”
His hotels are also talked about in social media but Loh has not actively engaged with the channel. “Virtually nobody books the hotels through Facebook but we do get people who book our restaurants through Facebook.”
Web bookings account for 30% of his hotels’ business. Hotel 1929 gets the higher share of direct web bookings. “The Internet is all about price and Hotel 1929 does well on it, but not so much our higher-priced hotels. It’s hard to sell character and context on the Internet,” said Loh.
• Loh Lik Peng is one of the mentors in the WITovation Entrepreneur Bootcamp and he will also be speaking at the WIT Conference on the “Generation Next” panel.
